I don't know, as a recent arrival from Java I sure miss my IDE.
- Having a background parser running all the time means I never save
a file with a syntax error.
- It's totally silly that I have to type method names for things like
File and IO and so on, the system should guess them for me
- Refactoring! I find that I want to change the names of classes and
fields and methods quite often, and having the IDE do it is a big
time-saver.
- In NetBeans there's this window on the side (I'm sure Eclipse has
the same thing) called the "Navigator", which is just a list of all
the methods and fields in the file you're editing, you click on any
of them to go there; huge time-saver.
- One-click to run the tests for whatever the cursor's on
- One-click to find all usages of whatever the cursor's on
- One-click to open the docs for whatever the cursor's on
- scope-sensitive select. Expand scope to current block, next
enclosing scope, next, next, etc
Yeah, you can do something in Ruby in a third the lines of code that
Java would take. But you might be able to write the Java about as
fast, with a good IDE.
[Oh, btw, I know that dynamic typing makes some of these things a lot
harder than for statically-typed languages like Java. Doesn't mean
they wouldn't be helpful.]
-Tim